September 2011 – { feuilleton }

Will Bradley posters

More from American illustrator and designer Will Bradley (1868–1962) from the height of his Beardsley period circa 1894–95. These are from a collection by Edward Penfield entitled Posters in Miniature (1897) in which Bradley’s work receives more attention than some of his better-known contemporaries. Half of these designs are familiar, the rest I hadn’t seen before, including the peacock piece below. Even though Bradley was trying out various Beardsley moves at this stage, his work was always a lot more versatile than the lesser imitators. More of Bradley’s designs, and work by other artists, can be found in the scanned edition of Penfield’s book at the Internet Archive.

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Brion Gysin’s walk, 1966

The Cut-Ups (1966).

More of the present preoccupation. Choosing Brion Gysin as a subject seems like a detour but the shots above are from Antony Balch’s 1966 film The Cut-Ups which also features William Burroughs, Ian Sommerville and someone-or-other’s cute boyfriend of the time who’s only ever credited as “Baby Zen”, a person about whom I know nothing at all.

I first saw The Cut-Ups in video form projected on the screens of the Haçienda nightclub in Manchester during their Final Academy evening in 1982, an event at which Burroughs and John Giorno both gave readings. The film on that occasion was mixed with some of the other Antony Balch shorts including Towers Open Fire, and together they made a strong (and bewildering) impression. The Cut-Ups, as noted a few days ago, may have inspired some of the flash edits in Performance, although Nicolas Roeg had been cinematographer on Petulia for Richard Lester the year before, a film which uses similar Resnais-like flashbacks and flash-forwards. In Balch’s film several sequences each a foot in length are cut together at random, a process which was a lot more radical in 1966 than it looks today. The opening sequence shows Brion Gysin walking out of a shop, along a street, down an alley and into the Rue Git le Coeur where the Beat Hotel was located at no. 9, and into whose door he disappears. I visited the street the last time I was in Paris, and took a few snaps whilst there, but it wasn’t until I rewatched The Cut-Ups a couple of years later that I realised I’d made the same walk as Gysin, having inadvertently discovered the narrow passage (the Rue de L’Hirondelle) which connects Git le Coeur with the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

The corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel where Gysin’s walk begins.

The route can be traced (after a fashion) using Google’s Street View where the photos have the usual drawbacks of being positioned high in the air and with a field-of-view which makes narrow spaces look a lot more cramped than they seem when you’re there. For those who can’t visit Paris, however, you at least get a sense of the Latin Quarter, even though the area is a lot more gentrified today than it was in 1966. The Beat Hotel, as I’ve noted before, is now the expensive Hotel du Vieux Paris whose website makes no mention of their establishment having once been cheap lodgings for depraved writers, artists and junkies. As for the Gysin film, I still wonder where he began his walk: was it at the Tabac Saint-Michel or elsewhere? You can judge for yourself at Ubuweb which has a copy of The Cut-Ups in its Burroughs film collection.

Rue de L’Hirondelle from the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

Rue de L’Hirondelle from Rue Git le Coeur.

Rue Git le Coeur looking towards the Seine. The former Beat Hotel is down the street on the right.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

Burroughs in Paris

William Burroughs and Maurice Gerodias.

More specifically, William Burroughs photographed in 1959 for Life magazine by Loomis Dean. This was no doubt a story based around the publication of The Naked Lunch by Olympia Press: in the full set there’s shots of Burroughs with Olympia boss Maurice Gerodias, some pictures of the author signing copies of his novel (which can also be seen resting on the newspaper above), and many shots of the shabby interior of the Beat Hotel where the walls of Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s rooms are decorated with Gysin’s calligraphic paintings.

Burroughs and Gysin.

Over at the Time archives there’s an amusingly snotty review from 1962 of the first US publication of The Naked Lunch. The reviewer isn’t credited but they trot out details of Burroughs’ history with the implication that nasty people can’t possibly be good or worthwhile writers. In 1962 the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was won by something called The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor. What? Who? Exactly.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

The recurrent pose 44

An item found in a collection of erotic drawings of dubious provenance, this piece is credited to Jean Cocteau. While I can’t be 100% certain it is Cocteau’s work it does closely resemble his other erotic drawings, and the rendering of the ear and hands is typical. Cocteau (or whoever) here does the obvious jokey thing with the Flandrin pose, something I’m surprised I haven’t seen already.

Elsewhere, Nathalie spotted a feature about the photography of Yannis Bournias which features another close variation as well as being gorgeous pictures in their own right.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The writhing on the wall
• Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
• Cocteau’s sword
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

William Burroughs interviews

With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (1982) by Victor Bockris. Design by Neville Brody.

If it’s interviews you want, some of the most entertaining are in Victor Bockris’s collection of conversations between El Hombre Invisible and the various New York notables ferried round to sit at Burroughs’ table in his Bowery Bunker. The British edition published by Vermilion was always preferrable for its Neville Brody cover design beside which the US original looks very dull indeed. The encyclopedic Burroughs site Reality Studio has copious lists of earlier Burroughs interviews. They also note the occasions when he put on his journalist hat and went out to interview someone equally famous, usually at the behest of a music magazine. A couple of those pieces are online thanks to the diligence of various fans.

Diamond Dogs (1974), a blend of Lou Reed, George Orwell and William Burroughs.

One such is the 1974 interview with David Bowie for Rolling Stone in which Bowie discusses Burroughs as an influence while Burroughs informs the singer that the heroes of his latest novel, The Wild Boys, favour the Bowie knife as a weapon:

Bowie: Nova Express really reminded me of Ziggy Stardust, which I am going to be putting into a theatrical performance. Forty scenes are in it and it would be nice if the characters and actors learned the scenes and we all shuffled them around in a hat the afternoon of the performance and just performed it as the scenes come out. I got this all from you Bill… so it would change every night.

A year later Burroughs got together with Jimmy Page for Crawdaddy magazine where the discussion circles around some of the same subjects, notably the writer’s obsession with sound as a weapon. There’s also this comment from Burroughs which is the kind of thing that always gets my neurons firing:

Antony Balch and I collaborated on a film called Cut-Ups, in which the film was cut into segments and rearranged at random. Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell saw a screening of the film not long before they made Performance.

Roeg later directed Bowie, of course, and is one of the dinner guests in With William Burroughs, while Jimmy Page and Donald Cammell both appear in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. The connections go round and round… Read the whole piece in a post I made a few years ago at the late, lamented Arthur magazine site.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive